What Deep and Global History Of Ukraine Really Means -- Timothy Snyder

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Ukrainian History Global Initiative is a history project led by Timothy Snyder that seeks a new empirical and conceptual understanding of the past, using an innovative interdisciplinary approach and the application of new technologies to write history today.

In the video, the speakers talk about their experience writing the deep and global history of Ukraine, the new technologies that help us understand the past better, and why history matters.

Timothy Snyder – Historian, University of Toronto
Serhii Plokhii – Historian, Harvard University
Yaroslav Hrytsak – Ukrainian Catholic University
Maya Jasanoff – Historian, Harvard University
Thula Simpson – Historian, University of Pretoria
Olivia Judson – Evolutionary Biologist, Imperial College London & Freie Universität Berlin
Victor Pinchuk – Founder, Author of the idea of the project
Pavlo Shydlovskyi – Archaeologist, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Serhii Telizhenko – Archaeologist, Institute of Archaeology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Oleksandra Ivanova – PhD Student, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

🔗 More information: uhgi.org

https://snyder.substack.com/p/ukrainian-history-global-initiative

Amidst a war of aggression, scholars in Ukraine have undertaken one of the most ambitious knowledge projects of our time. Over the course of three years, more than a hundred Ukrainian and international scholars are together creating a long-durée history of the lands and peoples of the territories of today’s Ukraine from the formation of the earth to the present. The goal is to bring together knowledge about a crucial part of the world, and make it accessible to everyone in the world.

This endeavor, Ukrainian History Global Initiative, recalls some of the great encyclopedic ambitions of past centuries -- while bringing to bear the technological advances of our own. It’s an attempt to write interpretive history that people will want to read, made possible by the findings, sometimes quite spectacular, of recent decades. The goal is to bring knowledge about some of the great themes of the past to a very large global audience. At a time when specialization can separate scholars from audiences (and from one another!), we are working together to bring knowledge to everyone.

I’ve been privileged to be involved with Ukrainian History Global Initiative from its beginnings. The thought process began back in 2019, well before the full-scale invasion of 2022. So it would be a mistake to think of this project as a reaction to the current war. But the fact that the project has proceeded, with two major conferences in wartime Kyiv in 2023 and 2024 as well as other meetings around the world, is a sign to me of how important the humanities are in a time of crisis.

We are told that, under stress, the humanities must be sacrificed -- of what use are literature, philosophy, and history when we have problems to solve right now? And yet colleagues meeting in wartime Kyiv have a clearer sense of purpose, more esprit de corps, , and a better instinct for the essential. And soldiers on the front (as they tell me) want to talk about history and culture. In traumatic conditions, people think about where they stand amidst larger forces -- and they think about the why as well as the how of life.

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